Eastside Theatre
The goal of this collaborative project was to recreate a historical, alternate version of the Savannah Eastside Theater as if it was 1959 again using photogrammetry, texturing, modeling, and compositing. Collectively, we brought the theater back to life as accurately as we could while also introducing other artistically placed elements in the surrounding area that didn’t actually exist in Savannah at that time. Throughout this project, I have focused on compositing, and helped out in other aspects when needed. Below are my final shots that I worked on - shot010 and shot060 with breakdowns!
To begin this process, the team and I went location scouting. After finding Savannah's Eastside Theatre, we established our shots and worked out compositions. We then moved on to research in which SCAD history professor, Chad Newsom, has been extremely helpful in answering historical questions about Savannah and the Eastside theatre during the 1950s. We discovered that this theatre only has one sketch to depict what it looked like during the 50's. My team and I were eager to give this theatre the representation it derserves.
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Our team compiled our research and ideas into a google slides pitch in order to organize the initial process of our project. In order to digitally restore Eastside to its 1950's origins, newspapers during the time were researched in order to find out what movies were playing during this time, so we could accurately display these findings on the Marquee as well as the outside movie posters. In addition, we wanted the theatre to be seen during sunset, so Ryan Harper, Miranda Leighr, and I went to Tybee Island and took multiple pictures of the sky during this time. I then stitched together the individual photos in Photoshop to create a single panorama that would be used as the backgrounds for all of the shots. I also downloaded a Photoshop Cloud Brush asset that I would be able to create Cloud pngs and project them onto the sky within Nuke.
We filmed an actress on green screen for shots 2 - 6. These shots were then keyed and 2D tracked into those shot so she would remain in position as the camera moved. To smooth out the track, I adjusted the Smooth parameter within the Tracker Node. Then, crypto mattes were utilized to position her inside the ticket booth. However, the camera for shot 1 moves position so drastically that we decided to create a digi double for this shot. Ben Gilbert scanned the actress in T-Pose and was able to retopo and retexture the result from the scans. A bit of color correction and motion blur was added to further integrate.
In order to add glow to the neon lights within the cg building, crypto mattes were utilized once again. Individual crptos were selected as masks and used with a Spin Glow node in Nuke. This allowed for different sections of neon to have their own specific amount of glow. Cryptos were also used on all of the glass assets as well. Specific AOVs were shuffled out and masked through these crypto mattes to make adjustments mainly to the specularity and diffuse channels.
Shot by Shot Progress
Throughout the 10 week duration of accomplishing this project, I expanded my Nuke skillset and am extremely proud of my team and I for creating a beautiful representation that this theatre has always deserved. The video on the left portrays a deeper look into our shot by shot iteration process. To wrap up our project Miranda added final color and grain in Davinci, and Valerian Ortmann created personalized "Lets All Go to the Lobby" characters for our team! Below are final stills from my shots 1 and 6 as well as a combined image displaying all of the shots together!
Final Stills
The VFX Team:
Jake Diana: Compositing
Miranda Leighr: Compositing, Production, Editing/Color
T'Naige Wallace: Compositing
Ryan Harper: Lighting, Modeling, Look Dev, Scene Layout, Rendering
Ben Gilbert: Photogrammetry, Modeling, Look Dev
Valerian Ortmann: Modeling, Look Dev
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